YoungForest's blog

Genome: The Autobiography of a Species in 23 Chapters

2026-01-01T13:15:01.000Z

Recommended by Charlie Munger in Poor Charlie’s Almanack.

Behavior is far from being controlled by our biological characteristics; our biological characteristics are often controlled by our behavior.

It is hard for me to believe this is only because we unconsciously gave them some “social norms”. In the earliest autonomous activities, boys and girls already show systematic differences. Boys are more competitive and more interested in machines, weapons, and hands-on work, while girls are more interested in people, clothes, and language. To put it more boldly, men liking maps and women liking novels is not merely the result of nurture.

The final chapter praises free will and explains that determinism is not fatalism. It elevates the whole book: this chapter is no longer science, but philosophy.

Genes influence behavior, and behavior can also influence gene expression. This circular causality can produce results that are extremely difficult to predict, similar to chaos theory. It connects with another book recommended by Charlie Munger, Deep Simplicity. His book list really is high quality.

Genetic determinism is better than environmental determinism.

Hume’s fork: Either our actions are predetermined, in which case we are not responsible for them; or they are the result of chance, in which case we are also not responsible for them. - The Oxford Dictionary of Philosophy

A Little History of the World

2026-01-01T13:10:06.000Z

Douban link: A Little History of the World

It really is worthy of being a children’s book. Although my historical knowledge reserve is fairly decent, my English is only average. Even so, I was still able to read the English edition smoothly. The original should be in German. I am not sure whether the author translated it himself or someone else translated it. It is hard to imagine that this book was written in 1935. When I first saw the publication year, I thought it was a book from the new century, but it turned out to be a work from 90 years ago. Yet the quality was already this high. Only when I read that his grandfather had lived before the founding of Germany, and that he himself had met the Austrian emperor, did I realize how old-fashioned the author was. Obviously, the final chapter was added later by the author, filling in the history after World War I up to the changes in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, namely what he called the history he personally experienced. The Western perspective, especially the German perspective, is quite obvious. The book spends some space emphasizing German-related history, which is therefore not surprising. It differs somewhat from the mainstream Anglo-American perspective. The writing and intent are both very high-level, especially its praise of the Enlightenment and of reason, human rights, and liberty, equality, fraternity. It is worth reading for children today and for most adults as well. Looking back at the history classes in the flower-growing country, they are entirely driven by propaganda and the needs of rule. No wonder they are called filthy history.

I learned an English word:
Celestial Kingdom.

The Hungry Golden Age: The Gains and Losses of the Qianlong Era

2026-01-01T13:05:24.000Z

Douban link

The prelude to a golden age is decline, and its ending is also decline

Imperial power is like a malignant tumor, one of the most expansionary things in the world. It does not allow independent people or independent affairs to exist. The exclusive nature of autocratic power drives it to forever strive to break through all limits, throw off all restraints, penetrate every corner of society, poison every cell, and finally suffocate the entire society in its tight embrace. The scholar’s pursuit of personal dignity became an obstacle to imperial power in the Qing dynasty, when autocracy reached its peak.

The British recognized that private property rights are a basic element of human civilization and the cornerstone of a free society. Locke said that property rights have a direct relationship with individual freedom. Property rights are not a relationship between things, but a moral relationship, a social relationship involving the stability of expectations and connected with causality. Without them, people’s expectations in social life would be impossible.

Written in 2022, using the past to satirize the present. This author has admirable courage. After finishing it, I fully understood the phrase “entering the brain, entering the heart, entering the soul”. The way of autocratic rule has always been like this.

The prelude to a golden age is decline, and its ending is also decline.

Indeed, as many critics have said, many foreign-related historical facts in the book are actually stories, such as the struggle between the German king and the miller, and even content from Marco Polo’s travels. The mainstream view in today’s historiography is that he never truly came to China.

As the protagonist of the preface and the second half of the book, I had known about the Macartney Embassy to China before, but I did not understand the details, causes and consequences, especially the British perspective and feelings. This book completed my understanding of the Western side of this important historical moment. The final chapter, “The Empire’s Genetic Code”, talks about what Alain Peyrefitte saw and heard during his 1960 trip to China after China had once again closed itself off from the world. The society he described was very similar to the one described by Macartney.

“The Chinese people of 1960 still agreed with Qianlong’s view of the Macartney Embassy. History textbooks, university course books, and the intellectuals I spoke with all used Marxist language to support the traditional view. Macartney’s attitude was ‘imperialist’, ‘capitalist’, and ‘colonialist’. Mao had done the same not long before when he repatriated Soviet technicians and advisers. At the time he declared: ‘We must rely on ourselves.’”

The Collapse of the Heavenly Dynasty: A Restudy of the Opium War

2026-01-01T12:54:54.000Z

Douban link

A few days ago I read The Hungry Golden Age: The Gains and Losses of the Qianlong Era and found it extremely satisfying. It reminded me that I still had The Collapse of the Heavenly Dynasty: A Restudy of the Opium War, which I downloaded to my Kindle last year. So I naturally continued with it. Qianlong’s reign went from peak prosperity into decline. Fifty years later, under his grandson Daoguang, the collapse finally began. These two books actually reveal many commonalities, and of course they are also deep analyses of the late Qing, and even of China’s institutions and culture. They can fully corroborate each other. This is especially valuable now, when today’s textbooks have been altered beyond recognition. Historical narratives are completely controlled by the current rulers. The beginning of modern Chinese history that we learned, the Opium War, is an especially obvious example. After reading this book, I systematically reflected on the impressions I had previously acquired. It also filled many unreasonable gaps in textbooks and online historical narratives. In particular, its re-evaluation of historical figures and its research into policies and their changes are very valuable. Especially in today’s 2025, China has rejoined the world order, yet there is also a trend toward comprehensive decoupling. Right now, in mid-November, Sino-Japanese relations have again fallen to a freezing point. Official and public emotions are severe. From this, one can see many shadows of history. China is making progress, but its historical burdens remain heavy. Its degree of modernization is still far behind the West, especially in politics and institutions, and secondarily in culture. In contrast, the economic gap is becoming smaller and smaller.

Skin in the Game: Hidden Asymmetries in Daily Life

2026-01-01T12:43:45.000Z

Douban link

I had previously read Antifragile and was amazed; it absolutely lived up to its reputation. But this final book in the Incerto series, Skin in the Game, feels less full of new knowledge and less surprising. Many times I read it in a muddled state. Perhaps the author had exhausted his talent. After all, he has been retired from the world for so long, and his core views have more or less already been output. The translation is also barely satisfactory, especially the Chinese title. The original Skin in the Game is much better.

Robert Rubin’s dealings. Some may think that overthrowing the aristocrats above us means civilization and progress, but that may not be the case.

In a system dominated by bureaucrats rather than aristocrats, a person’s actions are easily separated from the consequences he should have borne for them.

A centralized bureaucracy naturally creates bureaucrats who do not need to be responsible for the consequences of their actions. What should be done?

We have no choice but to decentralize power. To put it euphemistically, localize it, so as to reduce the number of decision-makers who are exempt from the consequences of the harm their mistakes cause others. Let those who do not bear the consequences of their own decisions make only small-impact decisions, rather than allowing them to make high-impact ones.

Recently I have been reading Zhou Xueguang’s The Institutional Logic of Governance in China, and this has made the feeling even deeper. For a place like China, where the institutional gene of great unity is deeply rooted, unity and governance efficiency have always been contradictory and in conflict with each other. In real history, things often swing back and forth and can never be completely resolved.
Among modern states, China is probably one of the most centralized. The centrally planned economy of the former Soviet Union, which has already collapsed, is probably one of the few even more centralized examples in past history.

The most intolerant wins. This can also explain why the Bolsheviks, not the Mensheviks, came to power; and why the Communist Party, not the Kuomintang, won.

Taleb really does like mocking economists. In addition, he also hates bureaucrats and politicians. Like me, he respects merchants.

Sure enough, Korean tourists are everywhere. Taleb noticed this too.

There is a very obvious blog or Twitter feel. It was probably organized into a complete book from things he had previously published online.

Being alive is stronger than anything else. Survival is the premise of everything.

Against Dawkins’s The Selfish Gene, and in support of Hayek.

The Bitcoin Standard: The Decentralized Alternative to Central Banking

2026-01-01T12:33:57.000Z

Douban link to the Taiwan translation

Hard money: a high stock-to-flow ratio. Bitcoin satisfies this extremely well, and is instead a deflationary currency.

Acceptance / liquidity.

The failure of the Hunt brothers’ silver speculation in the late 1970s has been repeatedly mentioned in several books I have read recently: Ray Dalio’s Principles, Paul Volcker’s Keeping At It, and this book. The case keeps getting brought back out.

Europe’s golden age, from the Napoleonic Wars to World War I, was also the age of the gold standard. Sound money is the guarantee of prosperity.

Most countries in the world used some form of sound monetary unit. There had never been a period of such capital accumulation, global trade, appropriate limits on government, and transformation in global living standards. At that time, not only was the Western economy freer, society itself was freer as well. There were few bureaucratic agencies in government devoted to “micromanaging” people’s lives, just as Mises said.

The gold standard was the world standard of the age of capitalism, improving both political and economic welfare, freedom, and democracy. In the eyes of free traders, the main advantage of the gold standard lay in the fact that it was indeed the international standard needed for international trade, international money, and capital-market transactions. It was also the medium of exchange needed by Western industrialism and Western capitalists to bring Western civilization to the remotest regions of the earth. It then destroyed the constraints of old prejudices and superstitions in various places, spread the seeds of new life and a new healthy life, liberated the mind, and created unprecedented wealth. It also brought unprecedented progress to Western liberalism, and was ready to unite all nations into a federation of free countries, allowing all countries to coexist peacefully and cooperate with one another.
Therefore, we can easily understand why people regarded the “gold standard” as the greatest and most beneficial symbol among all historical changes.

Modern monetary theory and Bitcoin’s belief are opposite, although both firmly believe that the supply of money needs to be limited. But placing hope in an independent central bank is also useless. Although “independence” sounds credible, in real life its independence is hard to guarantee. After all, it is controlled by people, and people have human flaws. History has repeatedly proven that governments, and central banks as part of government, even if separated from the executive branch under today’s separation-of-powers system, can never resist the temptation to overissue currency. In Keeping At It, Volcker described in detail his failed attempt to prevent the collapse of the Bretton Woods system. The newly invented “Special Drawing Rights” in the 1970s, or exchange rates in the 1920s and 1940s pegged by agreement to strong fiat currencies such as the US dollar and the pound sterling, could not prevent inflation and the collapse of credit caused by governments overissuing currency. The WTO in the Bretton Woods system (negotiated trade) and the World Bank (negotiated exchange rates) also proved to be complete failures.

Mises criticized it as follows:

Those most enthusiastic in attacking gold are those who want to “expand credit”. For them, credit expansion is the panacea for all economic problems.

Is this not exactly describing monetarists?

Chapter 4, fiat money, is the most brilliant and most important chapter. It is worth reading repeatedly for its reflection on today’s monetary situation.
It criticizes Keynesianism:

Because governments control money, they control most economic, political, cultural, and educational activities. Although Keynes had never studied economics formally or professionally, he grasped the zeitgeist of powerful government and gave politicians the decisive content they wanted to hear.

The persistence of the Great Depression was never because of President Hoover’s laissez-faire approach. On the contrary, he adopted strong interventionist policies. Roosevelt afterward was an amplified version. The classical liberal tradition that regarded “economic freedom” as the foundation of economic prosperity was quickly set aside, because government propagandists disguised as economists misled people into seeing the Great Depression, which had been caused and aggravated by government control, as a refutation of the free market.

Natural money -> metal money -> gold-standard fiat money -> central-bank fiat money -> cryptocurrency.

China does not allow private ownership of Bitcoin, similar to how the United States legislated in the 1930s and 1940s to deprive private individuals of the right to own gold. Both use violence in a delusional attempt to maintain government credit.

Austrian economics forever. Defenders of liberalism. Hayek is another Austrian economist I really like. His representative work, The Road to Serfdom, also fully negated government control and socialism.

Mises:

The principle of “sound money” has two aspects. The positive part is acceptance of the market’s choice as the commonly used medium of exchange. The negative part lies in obstructing the government’s tendency to interfere with the monetary system.

In my genes, there is also the excellent quality of low time preference: sacrificing the present and valuing the future.

Reading the attacks on these “monetarists” and “Keynesians” felt so satisfying. I had long felt that something was wrong with the knowledge I had previously learned. Ammous really pointed all of it out.

The first seven chapters discuss monetary history and the current situation; the final three chapters explain Bitcoin’s role and bright future. It is indeed a great technological invention, and it will be recorded in history in the future. As time passes, it will increasingly prove itself.

The author probably does not know that the Great Firewall exists.

Thanks to the revolutionary achievements of telecommunications, we can see this process underway. Although the printing press allowed the world’s poor to gain access to knowledge monopolized and forbidden by the church, printing still had the limitation of “physical” books, because such books could always be confiscated, banned, or destroyed. The online world has no such threat. Almost all human knowledge exists within it, and individuals can access it at any time without government control or censorship.

Another example of Bitcoin’s antifragility appeared in September 2017, when the Chinese government announced the closure of all domestic Bitcoin exchanges. The initial reaction was a roughly 40% price drop caused by panic, but prices began to recover after only a few hours, and within a few months the price had risen to more than double the level before the government ban. Although banning Bitcoin trading might be seen as an obstacle to its use because of reduced liquidity, the result seems only to have strengthened Bitcoin’s value proposition. More offshore trading began to take place in China, and trading volume on websites such as localbitcoins.com surged. This was very likely a counterproductive effect of China’s suspension of exchanges, because it prompted Chinese people to hold Bitcoin for the long term rather than trade it in the short term.

Blockchain technology is not as broadly applicable as advertised. At present, it seems to have succeeded only in digital currency, namely BTC. It was originally designed for cryptocurrency. Other applications face many shortcomings, such as high costs, insufficient incentives, and insufficient decentralization. In BTC, these problems do not exist.

The Worlds I See: Curiosity, Exploration, and Discovery at the Dawn of AI

2025-12-31T12:06:52.000Z

Douban link to the Taiwan translation

When it first came out, I tried reading the original English edition. I found it too hard. As a scientist, Fei-Fei Li’s diction and sentence structures are too ornate and complex. Perhaps because she is a 1.5-generation immigrant with painful memories of language, now that she is fluent she has started showing off her skill. As a bestseller, it indeed quickly received a Chinese translation. Great!

The National Air and Space Museum, which is repeatedly mentioned in the book, is also a place I long to visit. Unfortunately, I did not go there the last time I went to DC.

Algorithms, data, and compute. These are the three foundations of modern AI. Fei-Fei Li’s contribution to data alone is enough to secure her name and status. Many algorithms had already been prepared in advance, especially for computer vision. They were already ready in the 1990s. Compute only became ready in the last ten-plus years. I will read the Nvidia biography next year: https://book.douban.com/subject/37210122/

She places great importance on and feels great anxiety about her immigrant and female identities, even after so many years.

A typical Chinese immigrant family from the 1980s. The daughter is the pride of the family. She acts as the translator for medical staff and her mother.

Her thoughts jump around very quickly. This writing style, interweaving reality and the past, autobiography and AI history, feels very much like a movie. It may be adapted into one in the future. It would make such a good film, something like A Beautiful Mind. It is highly literary and beautifully written. No wonder I could not understand the English edition. Although I have read AI history in many places, and I worked on this during graduate school in Beijing, reading the AI history written by Fei-Fei Li moved me again. Human scientific progress is built brick by brick like this, with rises and falls; many discoveries lie dormant for years, then revive and advance again. Now, at the end of 2025, there is no doubt that AI, represented by large language models, is changing human civilization.

It is so moving as a representative story of the American Dream. I read it with tears in my eyes. It rekindled the American Dream. The last time a book made my eyes wet was Les Miserables, which I read in the first half of the year.

The final straw for immigration, the direct push, was unexpectedly that event in 1989.

Her mother was the daughter of a Kuomintang family, and therefore lost the opportunity to go to college. During the Cultural Revolution, she was also implicated.

In Chapter 11, her father talks about the past. Her grandfather died early in 1961; extreme malnutrition made his gastrointestinal disease impossible to endure. Her father was 14 at the time.

The reason both parents wanted to escape China was history and politics.

Chapter 2 writes about Newton isolating in the countryside during the plague and writing Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica in Latin. Although the book’s main contributions were indeed born during Newton’s miracle year while isolating in the countryside in his early years, the book itself was written in middle age at Halley’s urging.

I was also a smart kid from childhood and often ranked first in my grade, but after reading about Fei-Fei Li, I realized that people like her are the real big brains. The part where she was admitted to Princeton with a full scholarship was truly moving.

Chapter 4, exploring the mind: quantity can bring qualitative change.

AlexNet really was the product of algorithms, compute, and data all becoming available. It came naturally, again reflecting how human progress is linked ring by ring.

The book begins with a House hearing, and the penultimate chapter ends with the same hearing. The structure is excellent. When encouraging Fei-Fei to go, her mother said, “The reason your father and I brought you to this country is that America gives you opportunities like this to reach and influence the government. And also the freedom to pursue the boldest dreams.”

The final chapter is about CS231n, the computer vision course. When I was in graduate school, I also watched the online course, though I did not keep up with it. It was produced very well, but unfortunately I was not interested and only followed the crowd in listening to it. Sure enough, I achieved nothing. It also talks about the latest large language models. Now in 2025, there is no doubt that LLMs are changing the world. As a programmer, the way I work is already completely different from the past.

2025 Year-End Review and 2026 New Year Outlook

2025-12-27T08:22:50.000Z

Reposted from my blog

Previous year-end reviews:

Milestone reviews:

These important posts are all under the Diary category on my blog.

2025 Review

The Historical Process

The Strong Rise of the Euro

The euro was unusually strong this year. It stood out among many currencies, with the Euro Currency Index (^XDE) up 13.5% YTD. Everyone knows the joke about the yen’s depreciation:

When the company first offered Xiaoming an annual salary equivalent to RMB 800,000, he hesitated. After all, Tokyo’s cost of living was high.
But after counting overtime pay, RMB 700,000 was actually acceptable. So he came to Japan and began his middle-class life on RMB 600,000 a year. Through constant hard work and raises, he eventually became, in his friends’ words, a RMB 500,000-a-year talent.
Still, Xiaoming believes that as long as he gets promoted to Manager next time, he can earn RMB 400,000 and reach the peak of life.

Thinking back to when I came to Europe three years ago: the pandemic had just ended, the Russia-Ukraine war had broken out less than a year earlier, and the situation was still extremely tense. Winter was coming. Without Russian natural gas, the outside world was worried about whether Europe could get through the heating season. Under that backdrop, the euro exchange rate fell to around 6.8, which left a deep impression on me. At the time, everyone was dumping euros. Even Amazon China paid interns in euros, with a fixed euro amount converted into RMB for everyone, as if it wanted to clear out euros as quickly as possible.

Today, the euro has risen to 8.2, and reached as high as 8.4 this year. In three years it has risen more than 20%. I guess I physically bottom-fished the euro. As an elder once said, “personal effort must be combined with the historical process.” Without noticing it, my net worth went up.

Major Asset Appreciation

This year was a dollar depreciation cycle. Apart from the US dollar and US Treasuries, almost every other asset rose like crazy. It was a bull market: buy anything and it rose, only the magnitude differed. Gold hit a new all-time high above 4,300 USD/oz; silver more than doubled in a year; the S&P 500 exceeded 6,800. Even the long-disappointed A-shares, Chinese concept stocks, Japanese stocks, and European stocks all recovered. The A-share market reached 3,900 points, and Alibaba and Tencent doubled. The Nikkei also hit an all-time high, ending Japan’s lost 30 years. Major currencies all rose more than ten percentage points against the US dollar in half a year. Now the world is full of stock-picking gods; even Buffett and the S&P 500 are not enough to look at. The more prices rise, the more frightening it feels. The power of the dollar tide is indeed strong. Capital flows from the United States to overseas markets. It is foreseeable that other markets, especially emerging markets such as India and Southeast Asia, will perform well economically in the next few years.

The only thing getting beaten up was probably Bitcoin. Its yearly candle closed down 6%, at 88k USD, though that was also down from an all-time high of 125k.

In the mainstream dollar-based monetary system, this pattern of dollar decline and asset rise is sometimes also an illusion. For example, although the yen and RMB also rose against the US dollar, they did not stand out much compared with the euro. Some people price the S&P 500 in gold and argue that it has not actually risen, that there is no bubble, and that its valuation is reasonable. That does not make too much sense either.

From my Austrian-school perspective, I agree more with the gold standard, or the Bitcoin standard, and I oppose and doubt fiat money backed by government credit and Modern Monetary Theory. But living inside this system, I still hold US stocks, euro-denominated real estate, and debt, practicing Wu Zhijian’s asset allocation philosophy.

The Third Year of AI

At the end of 2022, when the pandemic ended, ChatGPT 3 appeared out of nowhere. That was also when I left my motherland and escaped to Europe. What a coincidence. Being at Microsoft, I also had the advantage of proximity, and the feeling and impact of the AI wave have been very obvious. Now three years have passed, and the AI bubble and technological revolution that people once hyped are becoming more and more concrete.

In 2025, I deeply felt AI’s improvement to productivity, work, and life, and also its irreplaceability. When the ChatGPT moment began in 2022, Musk predicted that by the end of 2025 AI’s capabilities would exceed those of a single expert human. Looking back now, the claim was not empty.

Although talk about AI replacing human jobs has always been loud, I am not particularly worried. This kind of “Luddite” view has existed since ancient times. Looking through the rearview mirror of history, on the one hand, they cannot stop technological progress; on the other hand, the feared consequences either did not happen or were not that severe. For an individual and for humanity as a whole, the situations are different. For individuals, choice matters more than effort. It is actually like the restructuring of state-owned enterprises in the 1990s: the Northeast declined from then on, while Sichuan, Guangdong, Jiangsu, and Zhejiang, which also went through restructuring, instead took off. Recognize reality and make choices, rather than escaping or deceiving yourself.

What I agree with more is Schumpeter’s theory of “creative destruction.” I am very optimistic. In the end, both individuals and humanity as a whole will benefit from AI and many other technological revolutions.

Large language models have already learned humanity’s vast corpus and knowledge. They have begun generating knowledge themselves and learning from each other. I do not know when the day will come when AI surpasses humanity’s collective intelligence, the so-called technological singularity. My prediction is that it will be no later than the end of 2030.

Philosophical discussions about AI are also becoming more and more real. From the perspective of the universe, intelligence, and consciousness, a second intelligence beyond modern Homo sapiens is about to be born. From the perspective of evolution and technological progress, it is also inevitable that AI will surpass humans in intelligence.

I also do not think humanity will go extinct or be replaced. Darwin’s theory of evolution says survival belongs to the fittest, not the smartest. In history, among the descendants of Homo erectus, only Homo sapiens remained; other human species either went extinct on their own or disappeared in competition with Homo sapiens. But humans shared an ecological niche with close relatives, and that was indeed a competitive relationship. The relationship between AI and humans is not like that. It is more cooperative. The modern world is also not a natural state, but a civilized state, and cannot be compared directly with prehistory.

Reading Ten Thousand Books

This year I read more than 30 books. See my list of book reviews. Ones I especially liked include:

Fei-Fei Li’s The Worlds I See
A Little History of the World
The Bitcoin Standard
Why Nations Fail
Genome: The Autobiography of a Species in 23 Chapters
Michio Kaku’s Hyperspace

Liu Cixin must have read it. Famous ideas such as technological explosion, the average density determining the fate of the universe, and ten-dimensional space collapsing into three dimensions all reveal the shadow of Remembrance of Earth’s Past. Recently I also read Brian Greene’s The Fabric of the Cosmos: Space, Time, and the Texture of Reality. Compared with Rovelli’s loop quantum gravity, superstring theory is indeed more shocking and more fundamental. Perhaps loop quantum gravity can also unify quantum mechanics and general relativity and explain spacetime. But for the more fundamental essence and origin of the universe, superstring theory gives the kind of answer I crave more. I read Kaku’s Parallel Worlds in high school. Concepts such as the goldfish scientist are of the same lineage. Honestly, compared with Hawking’s popular science works, Kaku is better. Hawking’s physical disability and unyielding spirit added to his fame and prestige. Compared with Greene and Hawking, Kaku seems much weaker in scientific research, but as a writer he is very successful.

The Fabric of the Cosmos: Space, Time, and the Texture of Reality

Scientific education not only gives people the knowledge and skills needed for life and work. More importantly, it nurtures scientific thinking, scientific spirit, scientific attitude, and scientific methods, giving people wisdom beyond biological instinct and a soul not simply born with them. Without scientific “education,” one is merely cultivating belief, not education. A person without scientific education can only be called trained, not educated.

Reading it made my hair stand on end. I clapped my hands in delight many times. Compared with Rovelli’s loop quantum gravity and his two books, Reality Is Not What It Seems and The Order of Time, although the writing is slightly worse, the facts, analogies, and logic are more convincing. They are all explaining the same questions, especially connecting the reality of existence, spacetime, and the macro-scale universe together. Physics really does have a theory of everything. Everything can be connected and mutually verified. However, although string theory is a strong contender in today’s physics, with many supporters, it has still not been fully accepted because of the lack of experimental verification and a complete theory. It is hard to say what the fate of string theory will be.

This year I also listened to a lot of Liang Wendao, including One Thousand and One Nights, Eight Minutes, and Eight and a Half. Especially after he was banned in the second half of the year, I listened even more enthusiastically. I also listened to various programs by Gao Xiaosong, including Xiaoshuo, Xiaosong Pedia, and Xiaode. I continued faithfully following Luo Zhenyu’s Journey of Civilization, Cheng Yanliang’s Left-Right, and the podcast Mianji.

I also watched more than 30 films and TV series. Ones I especially liked include:

Rome, seasons 1 and 2

Recommended by Gao Xiaosong. The plot, costumes, and sets are all excellent, especially the interweaving between commoners and nobles. In the end, all the foreshadowing comes back and forms a grand drama. Full marks. Very satisfying. The only regret is that there are too few large-scale scenes. I especially looked forward to Roman legion battle formations. In the show, they somehow brushed it off with just a few people.

It is Game of Thrones in the Roman era. It echoes the opening lines of Romance of the Three Kingdoms: “The rolling Yangtze River flows east, its waves washing away heroes. Right and wrong, success and failure, all turn to emptiness. The green mountains remain, though sunsets pass again and again.” So many heroes rise and die in the show. The first season is the First Triumvirate; the second season is the Second Triumvirate. There are many famous scenes, such as Pullo assassinating Cicero, which is also recorded in Stefan Zweig’s Decisive Moments in History. It begins with Caesar and ends with Caesar. Many characters are quite three-dimensional and deeply portrayed, especially their changes. Some change back; some do not. For example, Atia, who spends her life pursuing power. The male lead starts by defending the Republic and resisting dictatorship, and ends by destroying the Republic, serving a tyrant, and assassinating senators. The commoner characters are highlights in the first season, but their characterization collapses somewhat in the second. Pullo goes from reckless and impulsive, while the male lead goes from calm, conservative, and wise, until the two almost reverse in personality.

The film version of the musical Les Miserables

On the 40th anniversary of the musical Les Miserables, with the global tour now advertised everywhere in Europe, I watched the corresponding film. I cried my eyes out. Full marks. Overall it is quite faithful to the original work, though many plots and stories are omitted, such as the classic scene of Jean Valjean struggling on the carriage ride to confess his identity, and his second term in Toulon prison. Hugo really is the peak of Romanticism. But this is understandable, because musicals and films are limited by length and pacing. Little Cosette is so cute, though unfortunately she has limited screen time and grows up quickly. The climax is “Do You Hear the People Sing.” During the pandemic, Chinese people repeatedly shared it. I had watched the MV before, which corresponds to the scene in the film. At the time I could feel the courage and call of the revolutionaries, and I thought it would be an easy victory, that the army would be moved and join the revolutionary youths. Only after watching the film did I learn that it failed in the end. That was the revolution of 1832. It was not until the revolutions across Europe 16 years later that France reestablished the Second Republic. The MV’s scene in the story is only the beginning of the uprising. The song is sung four more times afterward, and every time it is moving. The final scene, with all the dead standing on the barricade and singing together, is even more powerful. Recently I read late Qing history, including The Gains and Losses of Emperor Qianlong’s Reign and The Collapse of the Heavenly Dynasty: A Restudy of the Opium War, and also world history in A Little History of the World. That made me understand and yearn even more for the pursuit of liberty, reason, and equality since the Enlightenment. Although I have never admired French-style violent revolution, with blood flowing like rivers, and instead prefer British-style gradual reform and progress. Rousseau goes left; Locke goes right. But the pursuit of humanity, human rights, and a better future is the same.

Oldboy

This film is amazing. No wonder it has such a high IMDB score. It has the stimulation of an action film and the brain-burning quality of a mystery. Apart from a few scenes that are too bloody, such as tooth pulling and tongue cutting, and although many plot points seem somewhat perverse, if you think carefully they can still fit the logic. The pacing is also extremely tight, with many twists. The ending is hard to call either a happy ending or a tragedy. Historically speaking, this kind of kinship-based love and passion is also common, especially in the West. Look at how many such stories there are in Greek mythology. There is no need to take it too much to heart. As the film says, whether you cry or laugh depends on your own heart. Still, it is understandable that the male lead finds it hard to accept. Everyone is different, and tolerance for perversion differs. I then followed up with many other Park Chan-wook films, such as Decision to Leave and The Handmaiden. They were all quite good.

One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest

The symbolism is too strong. It rivals Animal Farm. No wonder it is a classic. The more you think about it, the more terrifying it becomes. It can be mapped onto many people and many things. The role of Nurse Ratched is especially godlike. There are even two votes, which are full of satire. Of course, these forms of “democracy” are fake and manipulated. No matter how the votes turn out, they cannot change Nurse Ratched or the asylum’s reality. It is similar to “whole-process people’s democracy.” The protagonist is also classically portrayed, especially in his relationships with the people around him, his relationship with authority, and how those relationships evolve. He had many chances to escape but did not leave. In the end, he underwent surgery, lost consciousness, and became a useless shell. That is, he was punished for “picking quarrels and provoking trouble” and “subverting the state.” Still, his actions affected others. More or less, something changed. In the end, the silent man escaped, leaving a trace of hope, a happy ending. Otherwise it would be too heavy. Most people did not leave. Perhaps the entire asylum did not change and returned to normal. Very realistic, without romanticism or idealism.

Heidi

Sob sob, such a healing film. I felt like I was Heidi inside it, having experienced both city and countryside, always happy and healing others. Recently I had watched too many sad and heavy films: Grave of the Fireflies, The Pianist, Dunkirk. This film really made me happy. After watching too many films, I always worry that something bad will happen: after the two girls run away, after Klara’s father comes home, after the wheelchair is destroyed, when Peter cuts branches with a knife, when the grandfather warns Peter that he will punish him. But it always moves toward comedy and happiness. I am so grateful. Real life is already bitter enough. We really need beautiful films like this.

The musical Hamilton

Last October, I personally went with Pushen to the Richard Rodgers Theatre on Broadway in New York to watch the live version. The 150-dollar ticket lived up to its reputation. At the time I already found it stunning, though I could not understand many lines. English is not my native language, and rap’s vocabulary and speed are both fast. This time I watched the recorded version with subtitles and found it unbelievably good. The previous live musical I watched was The Phantom of the Opera in London. One era has passed; now it is the age of rap. It uses a new art form to tell an old founding story. The October 2024 live cast was of course different from the recorded version, and the proportion of Black Founding Fathers was higher. You can see the changes over these eight years. America’s greatness was laid down from the beginning. Its vitality and adaptability are strong. A lighthouse of human civilization.

The Pianist

Sure enough, people with talent have a higher probability of surviving. Everyone treated him as a precious Polish asset and helped him in small details and within their capacity. Of course, the most important thing was luck. I am truly someone who fears death and loves life, so this kind of film is especially immersive for me. Last month I watched Dunkirk, and felt the same. The pianist’s survival was even harder: alone, over a very long period, from 1939 all the way to 1945.

Dunkirk

Nolan really deserves his reputation. I did not dare breathe the whole time. The music and rhythm were so good, perfectly matching my taste. As someone who fears death and loves life, from the very beginning, the film’s theme is “survival.” Especially the male lead and second male lead on the land evacuation line: they narrowly escape death again and again. Poor French second lead, who finally drowns in the sinking fishing boat, so close to surviving. War is terrifying. As expected, the best war films are all anti-war films.

Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind

Too painful. I cried so hard. Do not watch it alone, especially if you have an ex, have experienced the pain of being together, then breaking up, and trying to forget the other person. The film realizes this science-fiction premise of forgetting the other person, only to discover that you did not want to forget at all, and did not want to break up either.

Traveling Ten Thousand Miles

This year I went to Taiwan, Madeira in Portugal, and revisited London and Marseille. I finally passed the road test, got my Irish driver’s license, and applied for an international driving permit.

Driving around Taiwan was the peak of all my travels over the years. I went in order to Taipei, Hualien, Taitung, Kenting, Kaohsiung, Tainan, Chiayi, Taichung, and Alishan. At Taipei’s Tonghua Night Market, I unexpectedly ran into Jensen Huang. In Hualien, I caught a free Mayday charity concert. In Taitung, I experienced an earthquake, something I had not encountered for many years.

For many mainland Chinese people, Taiwan is the most familiar yet most unfamiliar place. Familiar means that, through various official and unofficial propaganda and history, people of all ages have deep impressions of Taiwan. Unfamiliar means that long-term separation, the Great Firewall, information control, and publishing censorship mean mainlanders actually do not understand the real Taiwan. As for information from official sources and the simplified-Chinese internet, it is basically dominated by self-deception and burying one’s head in the sand.

As Gao Xiaosong said, “Taiwan is China’s past, and also China’s future.” “Past” means that Taiwan, because of political and geographic isolation, has protected and preserved much traditional Chinese culture, including the prevalence of Buddhist temples, national treasures in the Palace Museums of Taipei and Chiayi, traditional Chinese characters, and citizen and street culture. “Future” means that Taiwan ended martial law in the late 1980s, achieved party rotation in the 1990s, democratized and liberalized, and now enjoys the prosperity of democracy and freedom 30 years later. I visited Chiang Kai-shek Memorial Hall. A small part tells Chiang’s history and displays various relics, while most of it has been transformed into exhibitions about Taiwan’s democracy movement. But if we talk about “Republic of China legacy,” Taiwan actually does not feel that strong. Even Double Ten Day is a public holiday, but there is little private celebration. The Chinatowns of Manhattan and Boston actually have more of that atmosphere, where Double Ten Day is celebrated grandly.

Madeira was in June. The weather was clear, the people were warm, and road infrastructure was good, suitable for driving around the island and hiking. I also happened to catch a festival parade, which was extremely festive. Portugal and Spain have quite a few large islands in the Atlantic, very suitable for vacation. As former leaders of the Age of Discovery and former empires on which the sun never set, they now have these overseas territories left as witnesses to their glory.

2026 Outlook

Next year, I will continue to be a friend of time. I will persist in doing things with long-term returns: keep exercising, reading, watching films, traveling (I want to go to Japan, Korea, and Southeast Asia), talking with people face to face, and Just Keep Buying and Holding as an investment strategy.

In addition, I am also considering and preparing for changing jobs. I am already in my fourth year at Microsoft, and my sign-on stocks have only one more year to vest. I am facing a sharp income drop. At today’s MSFT price of 413 EUR, my pre-tax income would fall by 25%, and after-tax income by 20%. That is despite the euro’s major appreciation this year. The main reason is that I joined in the second half of 2022, exactly at the low point of US stocks, at the start of a three-year bull market. I physically bottom-fished again. I have talked with my boss, colleagues, and online friends. The best solution is changing jobs. Although I quite enjoy my current role, my colleagues are all very nice, and fully remote jobs are rare now, I still need to have options.

I gave up grinding LeetCode for two years. Picking it up again, I find it quite challenging. It is especially hard to be bug-free. I still remember many algorithms, but I have completely forgotten many corner cases. The interview bar is now even higher. Truly, rowing upstream: if you do not advance, you retreat.

Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty

2025-06-23T02:56:31.000Z

Be sure to read the English edition or the Taiwanese translation; those who know, know. Although China is a classic case of a historically failed state and of a country where extractive institutions produced short-lived growth, the book actually does not spend that much space on it. But as a Chinese person, the cases from other countries are also worth studying, and I did not know much about them before, especially many cases from Africa and Latin America. Still, everywhere in my mind I was verifying China’s failure. Comparing the socialist education I received from the beginning, which was terrifying brainwashing plus rewritten history and politics, with the various history, economics, and political books I read after becoming an adult, I strongly agree with the book’s arguments. I myself am also voting with my feet. If time is limited, pay attention to these two sections.

Chapter 13, “Why Nations Fail Today”, section 5, “The New Absolutism”

It describes the extractive institutions of communism.

Chapter 15, “Understanding Prosperity and Poverty”, section 2, “The Irresistible Charm of Authoritarian Growth”

It explains why China’s growth cannot be sustained.

I once had high hopes for political reform in China, but now I have completely lost hope. I have run, I have run.

Inclusive economic and political institutions are necessary conditions for sustained growth.
Critical junctures, institutional drift, and similar forces determine institutional development.
The book does not support historical determinism. Although institutional change is based on prior institutional genes, and there are virtuous circles and vicious circles, it is also full of contingency.
Poverty is caused by institutions: 1. the lack of a centralized government, or 2. extractive economic and political institutions.
Sustained economic growth requires incentives and protections for broad groups of people. The key lies in what Schumpeter called “creative destruction”. This is also the fundamental reason extractive institutions obstruct sustained growth.

Even technological innovation does not necessarily increase agricultural output. In fact, we all know that when the Aboriginal Australians known as the Yir Yoront adopted the major technological innovation of steel axes, it did not make them work harder. Instead, they slept longer, because survival became easier and there was no incentive to work harder.

(This made me laugh so hard. Same as me.)

The rise of robber barons and trusts in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries fully illustrates one fact: markets themselves do not guarantee inclusive institutions.

Business Cycles: History, Theory and Investment Reality

2025-05-26T14:15:29.000Z

The first 30% is especially interesting. Because it is ancient, full of stories and legend, and has relatively few figures, the economics is also easy for modern people to understand. After entering the post-Keynesian era, it becomes much harder. There are many figures, many schools, and many disagreements.

The most important core fact about the free market is that a transaction simply cannot happen unless both sides benefit.

Microeconomics is a science. Macroeconomics feels more like sociology. It is like the book I read before, Deep Simplicity: Chaos, Complexity and the Emergence of Life. Tiny changes in a system can bring incalculable effects.

It is much easier to predict economic activity by studying the stock market than to predict the stock market by studying the economy.

Manias and crashes used to be associated with universal irrationality or mob psychology.

Sixteen psychological biases:

Representativeness effect: we tend to believe that the trends we observe will continue.
False consensus effect: we tend to overestimate how many people agree with what we see.
Regret theory: we try to avoid actions that would confirm that we have already made a mistake.
Anchoring / framing: our decisions are influenced by information that vaguely hints at the correct answer.
Assimilation error: we misinterpret incoming information, believing it agrees with what we are doing.
Selective acceptance: we accept only information that seems to agree with our actions and attitudes.
Mental compartmentalization: we divide phenomena into different compartments and try to optimize each compartment separately rather than the whole.
Selective perception: we distort information so that it agrees with our actions and attitudes.
Overconfidence behavior: we overestimate our ability to make correct decisions.
Hindsight bias: we overestimate how likely we were to predict the outcomes of a series of past events.
Confirmation bias: our conclusions are improperly tilted toward what we want to believe.
Adaptive attitudes: we often hold the same attitudes as people we know well.
Social comparison: when facing a topic we find difficult to understand, we use other people’s behavior as a source of information.
Cognitive dissonance: we try to avoid or distort evidence showing that our assumptions are wrong, and we also avoid emphasizing actions that create such dissonance.
Ego-defensive function: we adjust our attitudes so that they appear to agree with the decisions we have made.
Prospect theory: we have an irrational tendency to prefer gambling on losses rather than gambling on gains, which means we hold losing positions longer than winning positions.

Paul Volcker: people think inflation is a cruel tax, perhaps the cruelest tax, because it delivers unexpected blows to many sectors and harms people on fixed incomes the most.

Friedman: inflation is always and everywhere a monetary phenomenon. To control inflation, one only needs to control the money supply.

Schumpeter, 1939: cycles are not something like tonsils that can be removed separately. They are like the heartbeat, at the core of the organism.

The Glory and the Dream: A Narrative History of America, 1932-1972

2025-05-18T11:17:53.000Z

The Glory and the Dream: A Narrative History of America, 1932-1972

Recommended by Luoji Siwei. The author’s left-wing tendency is quite serious: he beautifies the Democratic Party and demonizes the Republican Party. The writing is so beautiful that it is almost excessive. It reminds me of the Grand Historian, and I cannot help wondering whether it is also “half hearsay and half imagination.” Just kidding. I had just reached Roosevelt’s election in 1932. American history has gone through many challenges far greater than today’s. Roosevelt was also a person who changed America, moving it from liberalism toward statism, from isolationism toward globalism. It was also the moment in America’s 250-year history when it came closest to the risk of dictatorship. This is what happens in a crisis. Liberal democracy is hard-won and should be cherished. Today, on the news and across the internet, people are always worrying about America’s severe division, deglobalization, and the rise of the right. All I can say is: too young. Take history as a mirror. America is trustworthy.

The whole book is a chronological account. For foreigners, many parts are passed over briefly and still feel quite unfamiliar. This is especially true of the history of entertainment and mass life. Those stars, films, and novels: I know none of them. It is a very long book, four thick volumes, the longest book I have finished this year. Another long book I am reading is Les Miserables, which I have not finished yet.

The writing is decent. Many historical scenes feel as if the author were watching from the side. The vividness is almost unbelievable. In this regard it is similar to Sima Qian. Of course, now there is an enormous amount of historical material; it is just that the author exaggerates a little.

The author leans heavily Democratic. Although it is understandable that intellectuals are left-wing, in a chronological history this feels a bit too forceful. The “Spring and Autumn brushwork” becomes hard to keep reading.

After finishing it, I became even more spiritually American. Look at all these ideologies, wars, party struggles, technological progress, and the enormous changes in media and mass life throughout history. Every decade is a major change. Then one will not be overly joyful or sorrowful about Trump, trade wars, local wars (Russia-Ukraine, Israel-Palestine, India-Pakistan), or temporary ups and downs in US stocks. These are small scenes. Compared with the past, today’s world is truly much better, especially for an IT practitioner. One flaw of intellectuals is that they always indulge in nostalgia and lament the present.

The government never participates in any productive activity. In essence it is parasitic, while economic development mainly depends on entrepreneurs who are willing to take capital risks for profit.

Extremists can always attract a few people. In 1861, only a minority in the American North were abolitionists; in 1776, only a minority of colonists truly yearned for territorial independence. The best barometer of a social group’s mood is the sympathy it receives, not the number of participants.

America is great not because of what the government has done for the people, but because of what the people have done for themselves.

As the afterword says, the true founding spirit of America is freedom.

If freedom is to have substantive meaning, its tolerance must be broader, and it must include protection for those condemned by thousands. Anyone can cheer for Eisenhower, MacArthur, John Glenn, and Neil Armstrong; but it takes some breadth of mind to tolerate the Weather Underground members who hated Lyndon Johnson, the John Birch Society members who opposed John F. Kennedy, and the Liberty League members who made trouble for Roosevelt.

America’s divisions and historical disgraces are many: … but those were always exceptions. If one were to list examples showing its spirit of tolerance, the list would be several times longer, enough to be regarded as an honor roll of the nation’s freedom fighters.

Last year’s election broke many left-wing intellectuals. They cried that American democracy was finished and developed “political depression.” But I instead think this is a sign that the American spirit remains strong. As Voltaire said, “I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.” The Republican president and both chambers of Congress all won majorities. The Democratic Party can no longer blame the voters; otherwise it may lose the midterms too. Technological progress once again had a huge impact on the election: social media, podcasts, and the like. Just as radio once affected newspapers, television affected radio, and the internet affected television. Although everyone says America has never been so divided, looking across history, America has often been divided; unity is the minority state. The ending of the book, 1962-1972, is likewise dominated by division. Reading history makes one wise: take the present lightly and be optimistic about the future.

2024 Year-End Review and 2025 New Year Outlook

2024-12-27T16:04:56.000Z

Reposted from my blog

Previous year-end reviews:

Milestone reviews:

These important posts are all under the Diary category on my blog.

Ten Years of Programming Experience

The BGM here should be Ye Shengtao’s “How Many Ten Years Are Left,” a song that sings out so many feelings about life.

In 2014, at 18, I left my hometown and went to Beijing for university. That young man back then knew nothing about the future. From then on, I drifted from place to place. During these ten years, both I myself and the world underwent earth-shaking changes.

From “Shahe Town” to “Zhichun Road” to “Shilipu”; from “Changping” to “Haidian” and then “Chaoyang”; from “Beijing” to “Dublin.” I experienced much glory and dreams, many troubles and heartbreaks. I traveled ten thousand miles, read ten thousand books, and met many different people. I grew from a small-town exam-taker into a working person. I was lucky to choose computer science, a major full of technological dividends, and witnessed the rise and saturation of the mobile internet, the surging rise of AI, the peak and retreat of globalization, peace and conflict, and the continuous progress of human technology. The S&P 500 rose from 1,900 points to 6,000.

“Computer science” was already a popular major back then, but it absolutely did not have today’s TOP 1 status. At that time, Beihang’s undergraduate computer science ranking was said to be 4th. Only after starting university did I formally write my first line of code. I began learning C and Python at the same time. For a beginner, two languages at once meant total confusion: braces { versus newlines, printf versus print, compilation versus interpretation, static versus dynamic. Python even still had 2 and 3 back then. Many concepts only became clear later, until now I can recite them like family treasures. Later I successively used C++, Java, GoLang, TypeScript, and C# as my main languages for periods of time. Out of interest, I also learned niche languages such as Lisp and Rust. In sophomore and junior year, I finally started to get a feel for it. During those two years I tinkered and self-studied a lot, helped by the school’s hard-core courses. In senior year I began internships and formally entered the industry. I previously summarized my four years of university and three years of master’s study. I have to say, doing a master’s was really a waste of time. It is just that China is too competitive, and even finding a good job often requires graduate school. I was already 25 when I graduated. After going abroad, I found that most people start working after a bachelor’s degree, enter the industry early, and get promoted and raises early. Now I have worked full time for more than three years. Counting previous internships, I have experienced six companies. Looking back, over all these years I touched many things only shallowly, while my resume became quite flashy and full.

It is truly as Jin Yong wrote: Dugu Qiubai began with the “sharp green steel sword, too rigid and easily broken,” then moved to the “Ziwei soft sword, flexible and adaptable,” then in middle age to the “heavy sword without edge, great skill appearing clumsy,” and finally to the “sword of grass and wood, returning to simplicity,” where flowers, grass, and trees can all be swords. That is the highest realm. Programmers are the same.

There is another song I also like: “You Were Once a Youth,” the theme song of the film The Ark of Mr. Chow. Every lyric really sings my heart, from past romanticism and idealism to today’s realism, nostalgia, and longing. The wheel of history rolls forward. Fate has pushed me along unimaginable roads toward unknown paths. Although I make New Year outlooks every year, once the time scale stretches to ten years, life cannot be predicted and should not be limited. My current life was unimaginable to me ten years ago, and today’s me cannot imagine life ten years from now. People often overestimate the short-term progress of themselves and the world, but underestimate long-term progress. This is the terror of exponential growth. I hope I will always remain a youth, and continue to keep curiosity, kindness, and optimism toward the world.

2024 Personal Review

This year was another steady year, like previous years. My J-personality trait was fully maxed out.

Although there was nothing earth-shattering or thrilling, and I basically stayed in my comfort zone the whole time, my inner world has become very strong. I can now stay in the comfort zone with a clear conscience :) I do not seek to go fast, only to go far.

This is actually also because the knowledge I have learned in recent years has made me stronger inside. As the saying goes, knowledge is power. Stand on the shoulders of giants.

Hao Xulie’s “If you do it comfortably, you can do it for a long time; if you do it for a long time, you can do it well.” I believe in the “compound interest of time” advocated by Buffett and Munger, and I will be “a friend of time” together with Luo Zhenyu.

Buying a Home

Following last year’s New Year wish, I successfully bought a home in Ireland this year.

Buying a home was not something I absolutely had to do, and I do not think it is a rigid need.

According to the data in Just Keep Buying, from an investment perspective, buying a home is not a good choice. Of course, that is an analysis based on data, because real-estate appreciation depends a lot on region and era. In addition, because real estate is illiquid, it is easier to hold for a long time and obtain acceptable investment returns. But based on backtesting, buying the S&P 500 is actually stronger than buying property. Still, home ownership brings many other psychological and social benefits, such as a stable life.

I do not plan to stay in Ireland for many years either, so my need for a stable life is not huge. In the future I still want to develop in the United States, where the ceiling is higher.

However, according to Peter Lynch, from the perspective of investment mentality, young people are advised to buy a home first, then invest in stocks. Because buying a home requires preparing a down payment, while stock investment is recommended with money you will not use for many years: five years, ten years, even forever. After buying a home, the down payment is already spent; you only repay the mortgage each month, and the certainty is higher, so financial planning becomes easier. Otherwise, you do not know how much money to prepare for a future home purchase.

A mortgage is a relatively safe form of leverage, with an obvious magnifying effect on assets. This is especially true for a first home, where banks and governments usually have many preferential policies to use. For example, in Ireland, the maximum loan is basically four times annual base salary, with a 10% down payment, so the maximum leverage is nine times.

However, my biggest motivation for buying was still Dublin’s absurd rent. Because the price-to-rent ratio is high, buying is actually more cost-effective than renting. The mortgage is quite a bit lower than rent. In addition, although Dublin housing prices have already risen for ten years, compared with income and economic growth they are not as abnormal as in China. Add the income premium of being a programmer at an American big-tech company, and getting on the property ladder is still quite easy.

Buying is much more troublesome than renting: mortgage, viewings, bidding (in the end I bought a new build at a fixed price, avoiding the absurd bidding of second-hand homes), and contacting a solicitor.

After handover came decoration and housewarming. I am not a particularly diligent person, so the back garden of my terraced house has been full of wild grass, and I do not want to deal with it.

My quality of life feels much better, and I enjoyed five months of freedom without housemates. But it is still a bit lonely. I may consider finding some tenants later.

The most important lesson is: the most important thing in buying property is location; everything else is secondary.

In Ireland, realizing the Chinese dream is truly not difficult. I lived in Beijing for eight years before. Even if I smashed the wall panels, I could not put together a down payment. I sighed, “How can I get tens of thousands of mansions, and shelter all the poor scholars in joy?”

Reading Ten Thousand Books

This year I read about 25 books: list of book reviews.

Books I especially recommend:

If, like me, you are very interested in science:

Friends often ask me to recommend some investing and personal finance books. I usually recommend The Psychology of Money, Just Keep Buying, Little Turtle’s Investment Wisdom, Beating the Street, and The Millionaire Next Door.

After reading these, the point is really to understand a few things. 1. Margin of safety. Investment should use money you will not need for a long time, more than five years. Keep six months to three years of living expenses on hand as cash equivalents; the exact length depends on age, family situation, and work. 2. Stocks greatly outperform real estate, bonds, gold, and other assets. 3. Passive index funds greatly outperform individual stocks and active funds. 4. Going all in directly beats DCA and market timing. 5. Buying and never selling beats market timing. 6. The United States and US stocks beat other countries. 7. The hardest part of investing is psychology: chasing highs and panic-selling, emotional short-term thinking, all need to be overcome.

People often say, “Pessimists are right; optimists move forward.” But after reading more history and science, I believe: “Optimists are right and move forward.”

Traveling Ten Thousand Miles

This year I only made three trips. One was to Wexford, Ireland, to see cute puffins.

The UK and Switzerland

Another was to the UK (a self-driving trip in the Scottish Highlands) and Switzerland (Zurich, Interlaken, Jungfrau, Lucerne, and Rigi).

From Dublin to Edinburgh I took an ATR 72 turboprop. It was my first time flying on a plane that was not Boeing or Airbus, and I was very nervous.

I happened to encounter the Edinburgh International Festival. Street performers were everywhere, with all kinds of performances and “strange” people. People mountain people sea.

The Scottish Highlands self-driving route really lives up to its reputation. Driving on mountain roads felt excellent, with mountains and water all along the way.

On triangular yield signs, Ireland writes YIELD, the UK writes GIVE WAY, and Switzerland leaves it blank.

Once again I sighed that London is a place of outstanding people and scenery. The concentration of TOP talent is probably the highest in Europe. I visited the offices of TikTok, CAMEL AI, Bloomberg, and Amazon, and met friends there. TikTok’s canteen was the best I have eaten in Europe, even better than Google’s.

I experienced the Eurostar from London to Paris, with “one location, two inspections,” going through the Channel Tunnel. It is indeed convenient. But the price is not competitive compared with flying. The main advantage is convenience, since train stations are usually in the city while airports are in the suburbs.

I happened to miss the Paris Olympics, but Paris’s urban construction has indeed improved a lot, with many more bike lanes. There were also fewer homeless people and idlers on the streets. Paris is suitable for poor people: comfortable life and good social welfare. It is also suitable for Chinese people. Chinese food is even better than in London, and cheaper. London is suitable for elites, with more opportunities.

I also experienced the European high-speed train from Paris to Zurich. It was the best train I have taken overseas. Its speed and comfort were not inferior to China’s high-speed rail, and it had Wi-Fi.

Switzerland is truly perfect for J-type people. Public transportation is developed, punctual, dense, and frequent, with trains, boats, buses, and trams coordinated together. On this trip I visited Lake Thun in central Interlaken, Grindelwald First, which was a filming location for the Korean drama Crash Landing on You and attracted huge traffic, with many Koreans coming. In the north I visited Lake Lucerne and Mount Rigi. It was truly “at sunrise, river flowers are redder than fire; in spring, river water is green as blue.” Luckily I went to Scotland first and Switzerland later; otherwise the contrast would have been huge. Unfortunately I did not get a chance to visit Google’s Zurich office. Most importantly, I visited my former dream school, ETH, especially Einstein’s locker, completing a kind of pilgrimage. Next time, if there is a chance, I will go to the southern Alpine region.

The United States

The BGM here should be Dvorak’s From the New World. The last time I heard this piece was in freshman year, in the elective course “Appreciation of Western Music.” At that time I did not have enough knowledge and did not quite understand its expression. Now, on American soil, listening to it again and again, I can better feel its love and praise for the New World. Although it was composed at the end of the 19th century, today’s America has already doubled in age, and 2026 will be its 250th anniversary.

Unlike the Old World, the New World is not a nation-state. It was built through consensus. It is similar to BTC: all value lies in the consensus between people, not in separation of powers or a written constitution. Many countries copied separation of powers and still fell into dictatorship.

It needs to be emphasized that this consensus is “freedom,” not “democracy.”

I went to the United States once and visited several large cities in the Northeast: New York, Washington, Philadelphia, and Boston. As a developed country, the United States is indeed far more developed than Europe. There is a lot of infrastructure, roads are packed with traffic, and cars are huge, basically SUVs by default. Europe’s popular small cars are rare in America. Europoor really lives up to the name. Driving in America is still wild, even wilder than in China. Many cars with smashed doors, fronts, and rears are still running on the road. In Ireland, drivers are generally humble, lanes are also very narrow, mostly single-lane roads, and infrastructure is much worse than in China and the US.

Interestingly, in many states I visited, license plates are mandatory only at the back, and many people do not hang front plates. Quite a few turn signals are red, and are not easy to distinguish from position lights and brake lights. I do not know why they are not required to be yellow like in other places, which would be more recognizable.

The Statue of Liberty is truly a huge IP, comparable to the Eiffel Tower in Paris. It was indeed also built by Eiffel. The X-Men fought on it, and in the first Allied mission of Red Alert, Tanya also witnessed its destruction. All films and TV shows involving European immigration to America in the 19th and early 20th centuries show the classic scene of new immigrants entering the harbor by ship and seeing the Statue of Liberty, such as The Legend of 1900, The Godfather, and Titanic. And of course Spider-Man; the game is basically a New York tourism simulator.

I gained a deep understanding of Manhattan distance. When I was in Beijing, because of urban planning, I already felt the roads were quite regular, running due south-north and due east-west. Manhattan is strictly laid out as rectangles, similar to Chang’an in the Tang dynasty, with blocks for wards and markets. I also deeply understood those city skyline problems on LeetCode.

I also watched the extremely popular musical Hamilton on Broadway, and it really lived up to its reputation. It tells the story of the Founding Fathers through rappers. Most actors are Black, and their musical talent matches the form perfectly. The main Founding Fathers are played by Black actors, which also witnesses America’s inclusiveness and political correctness, without any sense of incongruity.

I touched the Wall Street bull and prayed for A-shares [laugh]. In front of the NYSE, I looked at US stocks. At that time the S&P 500 was already almost at 5,800 points.

I visited the World Trade Center, which felt somewhat like Beijing’s Guomao. The decoration is very nice, and the stores are high-end and classy. There was also the 9/11 Memorial. From it and from many later historical developments, one can see the profound impact and changes that 9/11 brought to America and the world.

Some New York subway stations are designed badly. Only after paying to enter do you discover that you need to take the train in the opposite direction, but changing directions requires exiting the station. In that case, if you miss your stop, you also have to exit the station before taking the train back.

I also walked around the world’s largest Chinatown in Lower Manhattan. The location is very good, and it lives up to its reputation. No wonder Detective Chinatown 2 chose New York. It has a long history, large scale, and many remnants of the old dynasty.

There is also the new Chinatown in Flushing, which is even more exaggerated. In Chinatowns elsewhere, signs are bilingual in Chinese and the local language. In Flushing’s Chinatown, there is only Chinese.

The EU is now treated the same as CN: Apple Intelligence cannot be used. It works once you get to the US. The EU is really too weak now. It is not good at other things, but world-class at regulation and legislation, obstructing innovation and economic development to this extent.

Washington, DC, was truly stunning. If New York symbolizes capitalism, Washington symbolizes the US Constitution. The Lincoln Memorial, Washington Monument, Capitol, Supreme Court, and White House. Much history I had read in books became connected to reality.

For example, the elder’s quotation: “of the people, by the people, for the people.”

The Capitol also has very friendly free guided tours. Visitors enter the Senate and House areas for civic education (of course separated somewhat from office areas, but only by a simple line: lawmakers walk inside, visitors outside), learning about the founding system and history, and being told about citizens’ powers and government powers.

Of course the United States also has many shortcomings. Many are actually two sides of the same coin, a double-edged sword. For example, its relatively extreme liberalism. Although liberalism has declined since the Great Depression, it remains the freest among developed countries. This brings economic growth, talent concentration, and innovation, but also relatively weak social security, large wealth gaps, and a lot of gun violence.

I personally still admire liberalism more. I will discuss it later.

Status

I have been in Ireland for two years and have also obtained permanent residency, Stamp 4. Ireland can be said to be very friendly toward immigration and status. I have not seen another country with such friendly conditions. Perhaps it is also because it lacks people.

On the work permit occupation list, slaughterhouse workers (because animal husbandry is developed), hospitals, IT, and accounting are all among the top occupations.

By nationality, Indians are the most numerous, accounting for one quarter, followed by Brazil, India, Turkey, Egypt, and many others. Chinese are counted under Other (5%), and Ireland is not a popular immigration destination for ethnic Chinese. There are not many Chinese people in Ireland. Chinese people still like going to traditional old imperialist countries: the United States, Canada/Australia, Britain, and France.

Ireland issues 20,000 to 40,000 work permits each year, which is quite a lot for a country of five million people. Beyond that, many people from the UK and EU come to work, and they do not need work permits. Although inflow is large, outflow is also large. Most people stay a few years and then leave, treating Ireland as a stepping stone. Because job opportunities here are good, and there are many multinational corporations. Many Europeans come here for a resume boost and then leave.

As for people from the third world, many also leave after obtaining status. Among programmers, many people have an American dream: they have already gone, are going, or will go to the US to work. Although US status is hard to obtain, that is mainly for China and India, the two populous countries. For people from other countries, it is still quite fast.

Although the Republic of Ireland has a main ethnic group, the Irish people (Celts and Gaels), it is still a very ancient people who migrated from continental Europe. In other places, such as the European continent and Britain, Gaels were long ago replaced by new peoples such as Latins, Anglo-Saxons, and Germans; now only Ireland and Scotland still have them. Historically they also experienced many hardships and barely survived until today. This is also a natural process in biological evolution. Similar ethnic replacement exists on many other continents. Famous examples include the Ainu of Hokkaido, the Austronesians surviving in Pacific gaps, and the Native Americans of North America. The Irish are relatively lucky, surviving on the margins, and in the past two centuries spreading both actively and passively. Now there are 70 million people of Irish descent overseas, such as Biden. By contrast, the island itself has only 7 million people, including Northern Ireland, and 15% are foreigners. In Dublin especially, half the people are foreigners. Foreigners mainly live in cities. Ireland’s rapid economic growth in recent decades also owes something to immigration, similar to how more than half the people in Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou, and Shenzhen are from elsewhere.

When working abroad, status is actually the most important thing. It mainly means freedom and risk resistance.

Liberalism and Conservatism

This year I subscribed to YouTube Premium and listened to all four seasons of Luo Zhenyu’s Luoji Siwei, perhaps 200 hours. Luo Pang is very skilled and excellent at summarizing other people’s knowledge and outputting viewpoints. Liberalism and conservatism are what he supports. In particular, episode 83: Did He Really Save America? directly criticizes Roosevelt’s New Deal and Keynesianism, partly rehabilitates Hoover, and fully rehabilitates the liberal market economy.

I also read Nassim Taleb’s Antifragile. Of course it contains many views, and liberalism is also what he promotes.

Growing up in a socialist country, the Party manages everything. The government, as a paternal authority, takes care of and controls everyone in every possible way. Although things have loosened a lot compared with the Mao era, there is still plenty. I did not experience the earlier era myself, so I cannot personally feel family planning, the Great Leap Forward, or the Cultural Revolution, but during the three pandemic years I was basically all in China, “enjoying” extreme unfreedom.

Of course, many compatriots are willing to exchange freedom for security. But everyone has their own aspirations; vote with your feet.

Combining this with Wu Xiaobo’s The Gains and Losses of Economic Changes in the Past Dynasties, freedom is also a prerequisite for economic development. As the saying goes, “tighten control and everything dies; loosen control and everything lives; once it lives, it becomes chaotic.”

Ireland is actually quite free, but high taxes are a major drawback. For many ambitious talents, many still go to regions with higher income and lower taxes, such as the United States, the Middle East, Singapore, and Switzerland. Of course, according to the theory of the “veil of ignorance,” a welfare society is also an advantage. If you did not know your starting configuration before birth, you would certainly prefer a welfare state.

The World Situation

The Republic of Ireland inherited Britain’s political system, namely parliamentary democracy. At the end of this year it also held a general election. The center-right Fine Gael and Fianna Fail continued forming a coalition government. Compared with many countries in the world, the political situation is quite stable. Of course, the biggest reason should be that the economy has kept developing steadily, and everyone can benefit, so contradictions are not as sharp.

This summer, I also closely observed and participated in Ireland’s local elections and voting activities, intentionally cultivating my civic awareness. The local council representative election happens once every five years, similar to county people’s congress representatives. You only need an address and tax number; citizenship is not required. Voting at the same time was the European Parliament election, which does require EU citizenship. The last time I voted was many years ago, for Haidian District people’s congress representatives. Of course, local councils have little power. They usually decide how local tax funds, mainly property tax, are spent, such as building schools and libraries, these livelihood matters.

Candidate posters were hanging everywhere on roadside lamp posts. I also received many campaign leaflets in the mailbox. The polling station in the district was a primary school. On the ballot, you fill in 1, 2, 3… according to your level of support. You can fill all of them or stop at any number. The voting process is: first, campaigning begins about a month in advance, with candidate portraits on lamp posts and leaflets in mailboxes. Voters must register online or offline first, obtain eligibility, and receive an election card with an assigned number. On election day, from 7:00 to 20:00, voters go to their district polling station, show identity documents and the election card, or simply report the number on it. Staff find your name on the register, cross it out, and give you a ballot, punching it by machine to show it is an issued ballot. Then there is a voting area with partitions, and you use the pencils provided there to fill in numbers. Finally you put the ballot into the ballot box.

I had several feelings about so-called democracy:

The right to be elected is more important than the right to vote. Candidates include various parties and quite a few independents. Qualification to stand for election is very simple, without review or approval. It is a competitive election, not a single-candidate confirmation election.
Rule of law protects freedom; democracy depends on freedom. I have to say, the socialist core values are far ahead.
Civil society depends on tradition and inheritance. It needs to be cultivated, educated, and maintained. This is the foundation of rule of law, democracy, and freedom. Liberia and Haiti copied the American system, but had only the appearance and not the substance, and therefore did not develop well. Citizens’ democratic and rights consciousness is far more important than a simple democratic process.

Many countries and regions around the world also held elections this year. Britain turned left, while other countries turned right. Of course, the one everyone paid most attention to was the US election, with Trump achieving “unified control of all three branches.” I am still quite confident in American checks and balances. Historically, Washington had the greatest prestige to become emperor. Roosevelt also greatly expanded federal government power, achieved unified control, and even broke the two-term norm, serving until death. Recently I have been reading Luo Pang’s recommended The Glory and the Dream, which tells the history of American presidents after 1932. The resilience of the American system is still strong. Roosevelt’s prestige was unprecedented, with surging public opinion. Some citizens were even willing to burn down the Congress that constrained him (of course they did not actually do it, unlike the 2021 Capitol riot). Later, after elections, both chambers were also controlled by Democrats, while the Supreme Court still struck down many bills. By the time the Supreme Court was also controlled by Democrats, many years had already passed. Yet there were still internal Democratic Party constraints and limits from states’ rights. After Roosevelt died, Congress quickly passed a constitutional amendment explicitly limiting presidential terms. This also means Trump 2.0 is already his final term. In terms of democracy, the United States does not rank very high in indices such as The Economist’s Democracy Index. But in terms of freedom and checks and balances, the US is definitely among the top.

Europeans may also pay some attention to the European Parliament election in the middle of the year, where the right won quite a few seats.

Beyond that, wars and conflicts continued.

The Russia-Ukraine war is in its third year and remains deadlocked. But I heard that after Trump takes office he will require Ukraine and Russia to make peace.

The Israel-Palestine conflict is also entering its second year. Hamas has been mostly destroyed, and Hezbollah in Lebanon and Iran have also suffered retaliation. Palestine is truly miserable. The current international order can be called broken: fists work better than reason. Israel also seized this opportunity and struck hard. Everyone else is too busy with themselves, and Europe remains at the level of verbal support. With Ukraine before, it was a reenactment of the classic appeasement policy before World War II.

Syria’s Assad also collapsed in an instant. The opposition forces advanced almost unopposed, probably because they caught a good timing. Domestic and international conditions were both favorable. Internationally, Russia, which supported Assad, was bogged down in war; Iran and Hezbollah in Lebanon had been too overwhelmed by Israeli retaliation to look after themselves. Domestically, 50 years of Assad father-and-son rule had long lost popular support, and the economy had never recovered. How the new government will be established, and how Syria will be rebuilt and restored, can only be watched next year.

At the end of the year, South Korea staged the Russian script of a president declaring martial law and sending troops to dissolve the National Assembly. In the 30 years since the Republic of Korea democratized, democracy has indeed taken root in people’s hearts, and this script had a different ending. The army surrounded the National Assembly but allowed lawmakers to enter. Lawmakers voted to abolish the martial law order, and the army withdrew. Six hours later, the president also announced the cancellation of the martial law that already existed in name only. The latest development is that the president has been impeached and suspended, awaiting the Constitutional Court’s ruling. I suspect he will not escape prison in the end.

However, my attention to news is actually useless. It is only out of interest. I remain very optimistic about the future, with unprecedented confidence in human civilization. Historically speaking, today’s global turmoil is not especially severe. It can even be counted as a relatively good era, comparable to Europe’s golden age from 1848 to 1914, dominated by peace, economic development, continuous technological breakthroughs, and considerable improvements in people’s living standards. Everything develops exponentially, and according to the principle of compound interest, the momentum is unstoppable. AI is in full swing, and SpaceX’s Starship is also exciting. Humanity has developed to a Kardashev scale civilization level of 0.7. I am quite optimistic about future development toward Type I, Type II, and Type III.

Liu Cixin once said, “Give civilization to time, not time to civilization.” But as a member of human civilization, I still hope to give civilization more time. (This reminds me that Netflix also released a new 3 Body Problem series this year, and I wrote some thoughts: Thoughts on Netflix’s 3 Body Problem: Question Cheng Xin, Understand Cheng Xin, Become Cheng Xin.)

Investing

Like last year, this year was again full of stock-picking gods everywhere. The broad market alone rose 26%, repeatedly hitting new all-time highs and reaching 6,000 points.

At the beginning of the year I read Walter Isaacson’s Elon Musk, and it was indeed exciting. I bought 10 shares of TSLA at a cost basis of 190. It fell as low as 160, and I eventually sold at 260. I guess I sold too early. Within a month, after the US election, TSLA took off, reaching as high as 460 and now still around 430. The volatility is huge. Without blind faith, one indeed cannot hold it. I do not have the fate of sudden wealth. I also bought very little, basically with a playful mentality.

This year I continued following the advice of Just Keep Buying and went all in on the S&P 500. Faith in broad-market indices is relatively easy to build, especially because I am interested in history and technology, and therefore have great confidence in human civilization. The fundamental growth driver behind the S&P 500 is still the accelerating improvement of human productivity and the long-term compound development of the economy.

CN also had the 924 market rally. Netizens joked that it went directly from ICU with a shot of adrenaline to dancing in a nightclub. Like many people, I took advantage of this short policy bull market and gradually cleared out both A-shares and Chinese concept stocks. I had bought the Chinese concept stock index for three years, and finally broke even. Of course, counting time cost, it was still quite a loss. The S&P 500 and Nasdaq I bought during the same period had already risen 70%. In A-shares I also bought CSI 300 and some industry indices. The principal was not large. I exited with a small loss and will never play with Myanmar A-shares again.

Better not touch non-free-market economies. Let others play. Believe in national destiny; cherish physical and mental health.

When I went abroad, 1 euro equaled 6.8 RMB. Now 1 EUR = 7.8 CNY. I regret not exchanging more in 2022. At that time I did not have a very complete future plan. Many things were uncertain, and the risk was quite high.

Only last year did I slowly plan out the next few years of life, with ideas such as buying a home and buying a car, and no plan to return to China for development in the next few years.

2025 Outlook

Go home. I have been on this island of Ireland for two years and still have not gone home, for various reasons, always delaying it. When I left, it was still during the three-year pandemic lockdown period, and I was mentally prepared not to return for many years. As a result, the situation changed too quickly. I left during the darkest hour before dawn.

I also obtained an entry permit for Taiwan and plan to visit the treasure island of Taiwan Province on the way. It happens that I am attending the wedding of a Taiwanese friend in Ireland. Traveling ten thousand miles, Taiwan is indeed quite distinctive and worth visiting and experiencing. As a child I grew up listening to Jay Chou, watching Hunan TV’s Golden Eagle Theater with my family, including It Started with a Kiss, You Are the Apple of My Eye, and various idol youth dramas. Some people call it the “light of the Chinese-speaking world,” realizing the “socialist core values,” and its customs and culture are very distinctive.

Get an Irish driver’s license. This whole journey of getting a license has been so bumpy that I find it hard to believe. I have taken the road test four times, failing each time for various reasons. Next year I will continue. Although “the first attempt is full of energy, the second declines, and the third is exhausted,” next year I will restart in Ireland. Fighting! I refuse to believe I cannot pass.

Keep exercising. After buying a home, I am farther from the office and no longer go there often, so I can no longer freeload the office gym. I got a membership at the gym in the nearby shopping center, 35 euros a month, and go three times a week. Continue next year.

In my career, I hope there can be progress and a better turn. In the previous two years, because of layoffs and reorgs, things were quite turbulent. In 2024, the economic environment clearly improved, and the company started hiring again, so I survived into a better time. In the second half of this year, I transferred back to my old US group. Although it is a great pity that my former manager retired early, it is still much better than the Israeli group last year. I rebuilt trust with the new manager, who was also a former colleague, and work is proceeding steadily, with some impact. Continue next year.

In life, I hope I can go out more, meet different people, and participate in more social activities. In the second half of this year I moved into my new home, with no housemates. I also basically work from home, fully living the life of a Japanese young male homebody living alone. Even as a 70% introvert, I cannot quite handle it.

Shi Nan Zhi Tu by Ma Boyong

2024-10-20T11:05:48.000Z

Weekly book 24: Shi Nan Zhi Tu by Ma Boyong

The author seems to be using the Han dynasty’s Nanyue issue to map onto the Taiwan issue. Ma Boyong is still as good as ever at taking a few scattered words from historical records and imagining a complete suspense story out of them. His earlier The Longest Day in Chang’an and The Lychees of Chang’an are both like this.

It is a very good full-length novel, especially in its descriptions of food, which feel sincere and mouth-watering. The ending is just too tragic: “Gaozhe’s” whole family dies. The old case is ultimately never solved or cleared, although both readers and the male protagonist know the truth. The punishment, delayed by more than 20 years, comes far too late. If the male protagonist had arrived a few years later, the murderer would have ended his life peacefully. But he still abused power for so many years and harmed many people.

“When a fox dies, its head turns toward its native hill.” Transporting jujube saplings across ten thousand miles, guarding a lonely palace alone. These feelings of Zhao Tuo, as someone who left his hometown more than ten years ago and is now even drifting overseas as an immigrant, really resonate with me. I almost cried. But like Zhao Tuo, I also know that I cannot go back. The hometown in memory has already gone far away. Even if I force myself back to ease homesickness, it will not help, and may instead bring greater pain. Because the real hometown is completely different from the one you imagine. Homesick people always beautify these things: remembering the food and forgetting the beatings, forgetting the pain once the scar has healed. The past was not as beautiful as imagined, the present is not as bad as imagined, and the future is far better than imagined.

Deep Simplicity: Chaos, Complexity and the Emergence of Life

2024-09-15T10:54:17.000Z

Weekly book 22: Deep Simplicity: Chaos, Complexity and the Emergence of Life

A book recommended by Poor Charlie’s Almanack. It understands the universe, life, and society from the perspective of chaos, which is a very interesting angle. Through chaos, a mathematical concept, the book strings together many things in the universe. Although we have a lot of physics knowledge and seem to understand the world quite well, enough to predict history and the future as Laplace believed, facts and theory prove that this is impossible. The best and only solution for computing the universe is the universe itself. It is impossible to create a machine or life inside the universe that can compute and predict the universe. This is a mathematical limitation. If, as many sages have said, mathematics is the language of God, then it seems this language also has innate limits and is not omniscient or omnipotent. Of course, mathematics has always been progressing, but judging from current proofs, many equations do not have analytical solutions. Iterative solutions are destined to encounter the butterfly effect. It is slightly worse than A Matter of Degrees. Although I think I have some mathematical and scientific background, the mathematics and arguments in this book still left me somewhat confused.

Interestingly, the previous book mentioned a solution similar to The Wandering Earth. This book begins with the three-body problem. The three-body problem is unsolvable, not because physics is wrong, but because mathematics is at fault, and mathematics has already proved that it is unsolvable. Therefore, if the Salvationists in Remembrance of Earth’s Past had read this work, they would have given up the idea of saving the “Lord.” Of course, in The Three-Body Problem, the Salvationists eventually proved this point as well, and failed in the struggle against the Adventists. One can say their strategy was impossible from the root and doomed to fail.

A Matter of Degrees: What Temperature Reveals about the Past and Future of Our Species, Planet, and Universe

2024-09-02T06:51:00.000Z

A Matter of Degrees: What Temperature Reveals about the Past and Future of Our Species, Planet, and Universe

Douban link

Excellent. It is a book recommended in Poor Charlie’s Almanack, and I came to it from that book. Munger emphasized the importance of multidisciplinary knowledge, and perhaps that is why he recommended this book. Indeed, this book gathers the achievements of many disciplines and explains them deeply yet accessibly. It is an excellent popular science book. Although much of the knowledge and history was already familiar to me, by using the physical variable of “temperature,” it connects medicine, biology (including evolution), physics (light, heat, quantum mechanics), geology, and chemistry. When different disciplines integrate with one another and historical developments interweave, one cannot help marveling at the greatness of science and human civilization. As the book says, from the Big Bang, to the birth of the solar system, to the birth of Earth, then to life, and finally to humans who think about all these things that indirectly and directly created us. Reading it made me clap my hands in delight many times. I could not put it down and finished it in three days. Being born human, I am lucky and proud, especially living in the 21st century, standing on the shoulders of so many giants, enjoying their discoveries and creations, and living a comfortable and happy life.

The most interesting part is in the chapter “The Birth of the Sun.” The author mentions that because of the process of core fusion, the Sun’s core temperature keeps rising. Heavier nuclei require higher temperatures to overcome electromagnetic repulsion and produce fusion. Today’s Sun emits more than 30% more energy than it did five billion years ago, and it will become brighter and brighter in the future. This is not good news for Earth. In another billion years, perhaps Earth will follow Venus’s path and become a severely greenhouse-effected, overheated planet. Life may go extinct on Earth. But scientists have already proposed a solution: if humans can continue to exist, they can harness asteroids and use the gravitational slingshot effect, which is actually a common technique for accelerating solar-system probes. Each time an asteroid passes Earth, it nudges Earth outward a little, then returns beyond Jupiter to replenish energy. Humans then use rockets to change its orbit and bring it back to Earth again. The cycle is once every six thousand years. The rocket power required is actually not very large, because the time span is long and therefore the momentum produced is large. After several billion years, Earth would move to today’s Martian orbit. Earth could maintain a suitable temperature and extend life by several billion years. This is truly a scientific version of The Wandering Earth, much more feasible than Liu Cixin’s planetary nuclear-fusion engine plan. Of course, Liu’s background requires leaving much faster. Gravitational slingshots are feasible and energy-saving, but they require much more time. Of course, the setting in The Wandering Earth is that the Sun will undergo a destructive helium flash within several thousand years, which is not scientific. Still, five billion years later, the Sun will become a red giant and engulf Earth and Mars. After that, life will need to migrate to Jupiter and farther orbits (this time we cannot take Earth with us), or even to other star systems.

Once upon a time, I also had the so-called ideal of becoming a “scientist.” In middle and high school, I was very interested in physics. I almost applied to Nanjing University’s physics department or astrophysics department. As a child I liked reading One Hundred Thousand Whys and Animal World, and also subscribed to a science magazine (I forgot the name, but I really liked it). The story that impressed me most was about the launch of New Horizons, which would visit Pluto more than ten years later. At the time, Pluto was still one of the nine planets. After I grew up, it really arrived, flew past Pluto, sent back probe data, and began leaving the solar system. But Pluto had long been kicked out of the planet ranks, and now there are only eight planets. In high school I also read Michio Kaku’s Parallel Worlds, Hawking’s A Brief History of Time and The Universe in a Nutshell. Even the People’s Education Press physics textbooks told stories of physics and scientists vividly and made one yearn for them. In university I also read George Gamow’s One Two Three… Infinity. After coming to Ireland, I read Does God Play Dice? and Reality Is Not What It Seems. If you like these books, A Matter of Degrees will definitely suit your taste too.

Thinking back, as a child I was full of curiosity and idealism, but under the discipline of reality and society, I have become very realistic today. In particular, under China’s education system, children’s diversity, curiosity, questioning, and courage are deprived. Even if one finally enters a good university, studies a popular major, takes a respectable job, and earns decent money, it is still somewhat self-pitying and self-loving. Alas, a harmed Zhong Yong. Some classmates, even if they studied physics in university, mostly switched to programming under social pressure. I have a high-school classmate who studied all the way to a PhD in high-energy physics and last year spent two years in joint training in Paris. I visited him and toured his lab then. But he also switched. Studying physics is indeed poor, and employment options are narrow. The academic content one actually does day to day is reading papers, writing code, analyzing experimental data, and doing simulations. Reading popular science books or stories is more exciting. People inside the field mostly have to do a lot of boring work. Physics and mathematics also depend heavily on talent. How many famous scientists achieved success young and proved themselves before 25. I myself am already too old. But as an outsider, paying attention to major scientific progress is still very exciting and joyful. Many times I recall the first time I read these scientific stories and knowledge when young.

Chapter 3, “Reading Earth,” is also very valuable for reference. I have always liked watching a Bilibili creator called Fangstaff, who talks about biological evolution. Many geological and life-evolution events in the book connect with Fangstaff’s content. That feeling is truly magical. The book mentions and analyzes the “greenhouse effect,” but in a more rational and objective way, and is more calm and tolerant toward carbon dioxide emissions. It is not like the earlier extreme views of white-left activists. Of course, the white-left has cooled down now too. The climate topic is no longer as hot as it was decades ago.

Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder

2024-08-24T02:31:57.000Z

A feast of conservatism, liberalism, and optimism.

Nassim Taleb is a writer recommended by both Naval and Li Zong. Perhaps they would call him a philosopher.

Antifragile feels more like a success book. It tells people to embrace pressure and bad things in order to gain restorative growth. It is actually like the passive skill of Saiyans in Dragon Ball: every time they recover from near death, their combat power multiplies. Vegeta used this skill to grind combat power, but in the end he was still killed by Frieza.

My two years in Ireland have been truly lying flat and comfortable. One should not enter Europe too young. People can become useless from comfort. Although life is happy, there is no restorative growth.

It also reminds me of the education I received in middle school, those famous quotes learned for Gaokao essays. Thinking about my previous habit of showing off references and using allusions, I really was young and full of sharpness.

Mencius said: When Heaven is about to confer a great responsibility on a person, it must first distress his mind, toil his muscles and bones, starve his body, deprive him, and confound his actions, so as to stir his heart, toughen his nature, and increase what he cannot do. If, within a state, there are no legalist families and remonstrating ministers, and outside it no hostile states or foreign troubles, the state will usually perish. One is born in hardship and dies in ease.

Sima Qian also said in the “Postface of the Grand Historian” and “Letter in Reply to Ren An”:

King Wen was imprisoned and then developed the Book of Changes; Confucius was in distress and then composed the Spring and Autumn Annals; Qu Yuan was banished and then wrote Li Sao; Zuo Qiu lost his sight and then produced Guoyu; Sunzi had his feet cut off and then set forth The Art of War; Buwei was exiled to Shu and then Lushi Chunqiu was passed down; Han Fei was imprisoned in Qin and then wrote The Difficulties of Persuasion and Solitary Indignation; the three hundred poems of the Book of Songs were mostly works produced when sages and worthies were stirred by indignation.

Looking back at my own growth experience, is it not also like this? I found that my antifragility is actually quite strong. Last year, 2023, from every angle, was the low point of my life in recent years. But slowly, I began to bottom out and rebound. The growth I gained this year truly exceeded any previous stage. The current me seems to have reached a new height again.

Large companies and governments do not seem to understand the counterforce of information. In fact, information has the ability to control those who try to control it. When you hear a company or a heavily indebted government say it wants to “restore confidence,” you should know that it is fragile and doomed to fail. Information is ruthless: the more press conferences they hold to “reassure” investors, the more they scare investors away, causing a death spiral or a bank run.

Antifragility arises under conditions. The frequency of stressors matters greatly: humans perform better under acute stimuli than under chronic stimuli, especially when a long recovery period follows acute stimulus, turning these stressors into channels of information transmission. … This is more beneficial than a mild but continuous stressor, which is mostly the sort of thing that makes you feel oppressed in life, including mortgages, tax issues, guilt from delayed tax filing, exam pressure, chores, email replies, forms, daily commuting, and so on. In other words, this is the stress brought by civilization.

I am a J-type person and like certainty. It seems uncertainty also has great benefits. Sometimes one must actively accept uncertainty and embrace change. But afterward, one must give oneself time to recover and grow.

If you are still alive, deep inside you will like a certain degree of randomness and chaos.

Mediocristan vs. Extremistan.

Mediocristan: there are many fluctuations and uncertainties in normal times, but in the long run it is more stable.

Extremistan: things seem relatively stable in normal times, but in the long run they are unstable.

Freelancer vs. employee.

Taxi driver vs. bank white-collar worker.

City-state system vs. centralization.

After discussing why antifragility matters, the book talks about some strategies for building antifragility: asymmetry (the barbell strategy), completely cutting off ruinous events, waiting for good events to happen naturally, and optionality.

Anti-modernization, revering the lifestyle of ancient people.

Reflecting on technology and opposing excessive rationality.

Using via negativa, subtraction, to improve antifragility rather than addition. The difference between “no evidence that” and “evidence that not.”

In politics, a good system is one that helps society eliminate bad people. It does not need to consider what should be done or who is in power, because the harm caused by one bad person may be greater than the collective efforts of a group of good people.

Companies are keen on making strategic plans. They spend money trying to figure out where exactly they should go. However, there is no evidence that strategic planning works; there is plenty of evidence negating it.

Is that not also true of countries? Especially big-government market economies.

In the dark age of medicine, doctors once relied heavily on naive rationalist ideas, such as the need to balance bodily humors. Diseases were believed to come from certain imbalances, and a series of treatments derived from these ideas were believed necessary to restore bodily balance.

For example, the notorious practice of bloodletting. Yet even in the 21st century, traditional Chinese medicine remains clamorous. Looking back at history, there is actually no so-called opposition between Chinese and Western medicine; there is opposition between modern medicine and traditional medicine. The West also had many therapies and ideas similar to traditional Chinese medicine before, but they were eliminated by history. When I explained Chinese medicine to a foreigner, I said “traditional doctor” and then described the therapies. He said, “You mean witch doctor?”

The author cites widely, which made me, someone educated in the East since childhood, realize that the West also has a long history and cultural inheritance. Taleb is Lebanese, from an Eastern Orthodox region. From Sumerian civilization, to Greek and Roman civilization, to the Middle Ages, which were actually not that dark, to the Renaissance and the modern civilization of the scientific and industrial revolutions, it is all a continuous lineage. The Sumerian civilization of Mesopotamia was the earliest human civilization, creating a brilliant civilization as early as 4500 BCE. The wheel and many inventions associated with the Yellow Emperor (2600 BCE) were actually transmitted step by step from the eastern Mediterranean. Even the Xia dynasty (of course disputed, because historical records and archaeological discoveries do not align; I lean toward believing it existed, and archaeological discoveries may catch up later. Since the Xia was also a so-called tribal alliance and had no writing, archaeology is harder. I also somewhat agree that the Erlitou culture is the Xia dynasty) was around 2000 BCE. Modern nationalism was born only with the French Revolution, a little more than 200 years ago. Chinese nationalism was slowly established after the Opium War and completed after the War of Resistance Against Japan. So there is no need to let nationalism obstruct civilizational identity. The facts and excavation of Sanxingdui were probably obstructed by this.

Tai Bai Jin Xing You Dian Fan by Ma Boyong

2024-08-21T12:37:52.000Z

Ma Boyong’s new work. Excellent, recommended. In the afterword he says it is a leisure piece, and it indeed reads smoothly and recreationally. I finished it in two days and could not put it down. Personally, I think its quality is second only to the long novel Mystery of Antiques, and better than The Longest Day in Chang’an, The Longest Day in Chang’an: Fifteen Days in Two Capitals, The Lychees of Chang’an, I Read Too Little, Do Not Lie to Me, and The Ming Dynasty Under the Microscope. I have read quite a few of Prince Ma’s books. He counts as my favorite contemporary Chinese writer. Among writers whose books I can read this many of, abroad there is also Keigo Higashino, and domestically there is Jin Yong.

It deconstructs one of the four great classical novels, Journey to the West. With insight into human nature and officialdom, the story it writes is actually more convincing than the original and more in line with modern narrative. Miscarriages of justice, factional struggles, and checks and balances of power are all brought out vividly. I heard a theory very early on, probably on early Zhihu, that the reason Sun Wukong caused havoc in Heaven was that Heaven deliberately made it happen. By taking advantage of the incident, various departments could shift blame onto the Great Sage Equal to Heaven, especially the underworld’s Register of Life and Death, which probably already had many loopholes, so they used the opportunity to destroy evidence. Tai Bai happens to expand this view, using the performance of the journey to fetch scriptures to reveal the truth behind the Havoc in Heaven 500 years earlier. It expands the idea into a 100,000-character novella. The writing is humorous and makes one laugh, but thinking carefully is terrifying. It contains no small amount of exposing reality and satirizing the present through the past, while also being full of Ma Boyong’s usual compassion, suspense, and reversals.

Poor Charlie's Almanack: The Essential Wit and Wisdom of Charles T. Munger

2024-08-07T14:35:33.000Z

Weekly book 18: Poor Charlie’s Almanack: The Essential Wit and Wisdom of Charles T. Munger

Charlie Munger passed away at the end of last year at age 99. I am ashamed that I only now read Poor Charlie’s Almanack, which gathers the essence of his thinking. It can be considered the product of 80 years of his intellectual wisdom, since the third edition of the original book was completed in 2008. Recently I have read too many success books, and I am truly full of expectation and confidence about the future and myself.

Read biographies and study those successful lives, as well as those lives that left regrets or met failure.

None of Munger’s successful friends disliked reading.

“Rapidly destroy what should not be done, then launch a skilled, multidisciplinary attack on what should be done, and then, when the right opportunity arrives - only when the right opportunity arrives - act decisively.” This is very similar to the thinking in The Art of War. The Art of War truly deserves to be a three-thousand-year classic, a summary of human wisdom.

The best way to simplify a problem is usually to first solve the big questions whose answers are obvious.
Galileo said that only mathematics can reveal the true face of science, because mathematics seems to be the language of God.
It is not enough to think about problems only in the forward direction; you must also think in reverse.
The best and most practical wisdom is basic academic command. Premise: think in a multidisciplinary way.
The lollapalooza effect usually appears only under the combined action of several factors.

Einstein: my achievements depend on four factors. First is self-criticism, and only then curiosity, concentration, and perseverance.

I just want to know where I will die in the future, so I will never go there.

The later part contains many speeches. Some of the content is similar, and in fact there is an inheritance relationship. Talk 11 is the longest and also the most comprehensive.

The Almanack of Naval Ravikant: A Guide to Wealth and Happiness

2024-07-27T12:35:07.000Z

Douban link

The first half is about wealth, suitable for reading before age 35 to change one’s current situation. Much of the wisdom is also widely recognized and easy to accept around the world. The second half is about happiness, suitable for reading after 35 to accept the current situation. But that part is more subjective and differs from person to person. It belongs to greater wisdom and is more rare. Finally, Die with Zero (also a book).

It connects with many books I have read before. It really is an almanack. Much wisdom is explained clearly in just a few words. For example, Atomic Habits discusses how to build good habits, discard bad habits, and the importance of habits; The Psychology of Money discusses the definition of wealth and how to obtain wealth; and books such as evolutionary psychology and The Evolution of Desire discuss human psychology and gender psychology. Of course, those books are much more detailed and more actionable, belonging to the “technique” part. The Almanack of Naval Ravikant is a collection, a summary of the wisdom Naval, as a smart person and a person who has read many books, accumulated over decades. He explains it to everyone using the Feynman Technique, which he advocates. Different people, with different life experiences and reading histories, will feel completely different things. I truly wish I had encountered it earlier.

One definition of a painful moment is: when you see that the true appearance of a thing is not what you originally wanted it to be, you feel pain.

The longing for a beautiful reality blinds one’s perception of the real world. So-called pain is being unable to continue ignoring facts.

The most important thing in science is falsifiability.

Naval recommends reading originals and classics. But I do not quite agree. Many originals are hundreds or even thousands of years old. The barrier to reading them is high, they are not easy to understand, and some content can be outdated or limited. For example, although The Art of War has only a little over 5,000 characters, reading it directly is still hard. I chose to read Hua Shan’s explanatory version. Maybe I am just too weak.

“If I could live 1,000 times, then in 999 of them I would live a successful life.” Naval’s success does not depend on luck, but on his cognition. It is like what Zhang Guoli’s character says in Feng Xiaogang’s Back to 1942: “Give him another ten years and he can become a landlord again.” Of course, the broader environment is also very important. I certainly believe Zhang Guoli’s character knows how to start again from nothing and will succeed. But the historical process of land reform, socialist transformation, and people’s communes soon arrived. The days when poor people, like in White Deer Plain, tightened their belts, stayed flexible, stored grain in good years, bought land in bad years, and grew into landlords were gone forever. What awaited him was only a great change unseen in thousands of years.

Wisdom is the thinking ability to know the long-term consequences of personal actions.

Liu Shen Lei Lei Reads Tang Poetry

2024-07-25T14:25:35.000Z

It has the feeling of Dangnian Mingyue’s Those Things in the Ming Dynasty. I do not know whether it is intentional imitation or unintentional resemblance.

It often interacts with Jin Yong’s novels, especially with the same compassion for the world.

Yue Lingshan: “Self-pity, self-sorrow, and self-resentment; no regret for true feeling, no regret for foolish devotion.”

It is normal for intellectuals to satirize the present through the past and express their views indirectly in writing. Lei Lei specifically wrote an essay called “Bai Juyi, Who Put Down His Chopsticks and Cursed His Mother,” expressing dissatisfaction with today’s environment of speech control, and yearning for and remembering the openness and tolerance of the Tang dynasty.

This year I read too many realist books and gained a lot of knowledge and wisdom. But this book is the most romantic of them, and it is very moving.

The four routines of Tang poetry: pastoral poetry has homebody men; frontier poetry has many angry young men; poems on antiquity are too painful; farewell poems are full of bromance.

“We often equate praise with loyalty and criticism with hostility. This is truly an enormous misunderstanding. Luo Yin tells us: that equation has never existed.” This is so similar to today’s social reality.